The "Advanced CORBA Programming with C++" is a good book. It covers in-depth the memory management, CORBA, as well the potential reasons for possible crashes. In the software development process, software architects, software designer and software developers should read this book. The only leak I found is the chapter about multithreading. It would be nice if in the next edition, the authors will cover in-depth also this subject. Thanks for this book. Romain Cloos; MSc Computer Science; Société Européenne des Satellites

An excellent book for beginning COM developers. Readers of this book should be already experienced in C / C++ development, but no prior COM knowledge is necessary. The text is well-written and follows a clear, logical sequence from the simple to the complex. By the time a reader reaches the conclusion of this book, he or she will have an excellent base for COM / ATL development.The only downside I found was that the examples were sometimes not completely correct. These generally tended to be very minor issues, such as indentation, or not initializing variables before use, etc. None of these types of errors detracted, however, from the lesson the examples were supposed to convey.I'd call this book a Must Have, and well worth its price.

Merriam-Webster is the gold standard for American dictionaries with one of the best team of lexicographers in the world. This eleventh edition has 10,000 new words but you do not need it if you have the tenth edition. Most of the slang words (bling-bling, etc.) are already passe' in the circles that they are used in. The new words from the technical fields will not be of much use to you (you probably already have a specialist's dictionary if you need to know what they mean). I have the tenth and it will suit me fine until another ten years go by and the 12th edition comes out.

Are you an experienced developer? Are you new to ASP.NET (but have at least some understanding of web programming)? If so, you have found your book!I fit the above criteria, and I purchased this book. It is clearly and concisely written, contains very relevant material, and has a well-planned flow. The book does an outstanding job of explaining the intricacies of the new .NET platform- how it works, and how to properly utilize it. It's more for teaching the reader .NET than for reference- though you will likely use it for reference in the future.The author does a great job of explaining the major points of the architecture. The chapters on error handling, data binding, validation, state management and security are especially well written (yes, basically all of it). You will learn how to build a basic .net app from the ground up. However, the book does assume a certain level of intelligence and experience in the reader- it won't hold your hand, nor bog you down with the obvious details (however you want to look at it). Yet it still manages to cover its topics very thoroughly.Other books often give vanilla examples and have multiple authors who use all different styles, and expect you to learn from cookie-cutter examples without telling you why they chose to do something a certain way, or if alternatives even exist. Unfortunately, the problems we face when developing usually don't fit an example in a book, so we actually need to understand the architecture with which we're working. This book is the first step towards understanding the hows and whys of .NET. It should be read cover to cover. It's so well written and concise that I could actually go out on a limb here and call it a page-turner! :)After reading it, I had confidence in how I was designing my apps because I knew how it would behave, and knew I was using the most efficient method.This book should not be the only one in your collection. Truth is, there is no one-stop-shopping book for ASP.NET. I recommend the following in addition to this title: Programming ASP.NET (O'Reilly & Assoc.)- a more thorough title and excellent reference, but leaves out much of the explanation/understanding that this book provides.ASP.NET Website Programming (Wrox) - explains web methodology thoroughly, with excellent examplesADO.NET in a Nutshell (O'Reilly & Assoc.) - indispensible if you're using databasesThese four books will be all you need, and you will keep going back to each of them.